Ironically, I use "new" on other sites to bypass their algorithms and see the raw stream. But I've never even had the urge here, nor really remembered it exists.
It's probably because I have always looked at HN as a sort of amusement or curiosity. The curated listing is part of the entertainment. Not because it usually resonates for me, but because it gives me this glimpse into Otherness. The comments can be more resonant, once in a while.
It's a bit like wandering through the bar district and finding your old haunts missing and replaced with weird facades and fashions. But here and there, you notice some patrons are interjecting with stories eerily similar to the one on the tip of your tongue...
Reddit had a term for people who read the new page -- the knights of new. The small group of people who make the site work by traipsing through the sludge that is the new page, finding the gems within.
We did a lot of experiments to try and get more people to look at the new page or new content. One was placing one new item at the top of your home page and changing that every couple of minutes. The other was the "rising" sort, which was similar to the hot sort on the front page, but much higher velocity.
None of them really worked all that well. The group of people who read new are a unique breed. :)
Yeah, I'm certainly in the minority. I have an "all or nothing" brain problem.
To be clear, I'm not reading tons of submissions. I just don't like the idea of only being presented with the top N submissions by vote count. I'd rather scroll a feed that auto-marks each one as read until I see something interesting.
I have the same problem with YouTube. I (almost) only consume entire channels via RSS feeds (sans shorts). I never see the home page, and I only occasionally click an algorithmic recommendation.
I use /active more then /newest because I often am looking for a discussion already happening so I can learn from others.
I feel that new is wasted on me because I'm not confident that my own thoughts on what's interesting and worth front page promotion is well... interesting to the community.
Yea, /active is HN's secret, killer app. HN's default ranking algorithm often penalizes stories that "get too much activity" which means that if you aren't one of those guys who refreshes the main page every 5 minutes, you're going to miss a lot of newsworthy articles that happen to get many comments. I'd recommend all HN readers visit /active once at the end of the day to see what The Algorithm hid from the front page.
Those missing stories are nearly all Reddit-style political flamewars which is not what this site is for, so don't think finding something on active is some massive W.
Often the frontpage will include a new submission with few votes at the top, I recall others in other threads speculating that this is an intentional way (rather than an edge case in the ranking algo) of getting new posts evaluated without people having to visit /newest
I do not have showdead on, but I visit newest most times I visit HN. I'm more likely to browse the headlines/comments on the front page but click on links on newest.
If by newest you mean new, then I check it several times a day. It's a nice way of finding interesting content and submissions that will never make it to the Frontpage either because of bad timing or whatever reason.
I'm a little confused by there being multiple people in the comments who are confused by this. They're basically the same word, and even if they weren't, you only have to look at the URL bar to see "newest". I know it's an unimportant phenomenon for me to be commenting on, but it strikes me as unusual.
Downvoting/flagging kind of just "appear" for most before they get a chance to read about it being a thing.
Even when someone unlocks flagging they often don't know you can flag comments instead of just downvote them because you have to load the direct link (most easily, the timestamp link) to see it.
I actually don't remember how you're supposed to know about https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc. I'm pretty sure it's not linked on the main page and the input box doesn't make mention of it.
There are some lists out there (probably easiest to just ask AI or check the lists page) of special URLs like /bestcomments or /classic. There are also some query paramters available for certain URLs. Keep in mind the lists page is not exhaustive, e.g. /over
Many never poke around their settings enough to understand showdead or noprocrast exist/how they work.
I bet a good number learned that polls were a thing from this post :D.
That's what comes to mind but it can be hard to remember some of the things because you get ao used to them being there personally (I'm continually surprised users often reach the karma threshold for downvoting before understanding they can flag/vouch comments). I'm sure others can fill in some good ones :).
> I actually don't remember how you're supposed to know about https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc. I'm pretty sure it's not linked on the main page and the input box doesn't make mention of it.
It's in the FAQ, linked at the bottom of (almost) every page along with the guidelines.
I don’t know if this is the data point you’d like, but I forget that it exists. I forget to such a point that I’m going to check out newest now because it seems like a page I should include every visit here.
So my answer is ‘never’ but I’m working on it. I keep showdead turned on.
Edit - I have been making a big mistake here for a long time. Newest is a heck of a good page and I need to make visiting it into a habit. Thanks for posting this poll; I wouldn’t have remembered that I forgot about a feature without this.
I’ve almost entirely moved to /newest because there’s almost no point in discussion anymore
I still comment on main threads out of habit but im probably 10% as active as a decade ago once a top comment gets locked into a thread nothing else matters and there’s no discussion around the edges
All the “AI” debates are played out and boring with basically anyone still excited about anything related to AI treated poorly by people who have basically no expertise in it but mad capitalist automation came for their job